Broadway, when it seeks decadence or high life, invariably looks to Berlin; and the lush and the louche effortlessly intertwine in this invigorating musical adaptation of Vicki Baum's 1920s portmanteau novel. It also works even better in Michael Grandage's intimate Donmar production than it did 12 years ago in the wide open spaces of the Dominion.

Luther Davis's book deserves credit for compressing so many criss-crossing stories into a show that runs under two hours. Starting with a perfectly drilled parade of guests and staff, the show gradually focuses on intersecting individual lives. There is the fading ballerina, the bankrupt businessman, the dying bookkeeper, the debt-ridden baron, the pregnant typist and many more.

Viewed singly, the stories may have a soapy quality but placed together they offer a panoramic picture of a city in thrall to money, appetite and jazz-age frenzy.

This is the point firmly grasped by Grandage and his designer, Christopher Oram, who provides a stunning mural of Dix and Beckmann images: that this is an ensemble show in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The score by Robert Wright and George Forrest, supplemented by Maury Yeston, may not have the borrowed, Borodin-inspired tunefulness of their kitsch Kismet. But they write superb dance-tunes and when the company, in Adam Cooper's expressive choreography, glide into a foxtrot or charleston we get the hedonistic flavour of the Berlin 1920s.

Individual performances also emerge strongly. Daniel Evans as the bookkeeper and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as the dancer, who tells her lover "I've ballet slippers older than you", may ideally be too young for their roles but both movingly capture the sense of rediscovered life.

Gillian Bevan as the dancer's lesbian companion also beautifully conveys years of unnoticed devotion. And Julian Ovenden as a dashingly impoverished baron and Helen Baker, in the old Joan Crawford role of the typist dreaming of Hollywood, possess the giddy effervescence of youth.

Gary Raymond even makes something of the choric figure of a disillusioned doctor shooting up in the privacy of his room.

It isn't a classic Berlin musical. But it manages to suggest that a hotel offers a microcosm of human experience; and, when the cast lines up against the back wall economically to evoke a disgruntled shareholders' meeting or a depleted ballet-audience, you know you are in the hands of a master director.